Yesterday was the Stratford City orienteering race, organised and planned by Josh Jenner, with the map done by myself. The map was a real fiddle to do, requiring four site visits and many hours in front of the computer to build up the six mapped levels (the top half of the is shown above) but the race went well in the end, with no major complaints, only minor ones (a few people found the level change arrows hard to spot, and some people didn’t spot some Out of Bounds areas and so ended up in an area that wasn’t mapped to detail.)

The weather was great (cold and clear outside, warm inside!) and nearly 100 people raced in five waves, including, notably, a wheelchair competitor. Not many “regular” orienteering areas are both wheelchair friendly and traffic free. I did have to hang some of the controls very high though – a couple over six foot off the ground – to use suitable mounting points. The centre management were enthusiastic about the race, and another edition is possibly in the future – possibly using a different format to keep the idea fresh.

After the race, two of the controls were missing – it turns out that one of the collectors had kept one by mistake, and the other had been retrieve by a concerned member of the public (it wasn’t locked down to the chair) and handed in to security, so eventually we were reunited with them all – a good thing as the control boxes are very expensive! The centre was, as expected, almost deserted for the earlier waves, but from 11am it started to get a good busy and it was a good thing the orienteering was out of the way.

I managed to get a run in myself, taking part in the last wave. I was strictly non-competitive, as I knew exactly where all the controls where and the best route to take between them. Despite this I was still beaten by Ed. My route was around 5.5km, I don’t think it would have been possible to visit all the controls and run in under 5km, which is not bad for a site that is only 400m across. The format of the race was score, i.e. controls could be visited in any order.

Some photos from me are here, and more photos and the results are on Josh’s website.

Thanks to Josh for the concept and organisation, and Westfield centre management for letting it happen and giving us full reign through the centre and even control suggestions!

If you thought the Barbican’s three levels were tricky to orienteer through, then you haven’t seen anything yet – there will a race taking place in and around the Westfield Stratford City retail complex in east London, on Sunday 15 April. The race will be over five levels of the indoor shopping centre area, plus the surrounding outside area.

The race is being organised by Josh Jenner, his website has full details and entries are open. I’m doing the map, which will be a 1:4000 A4 full-colour ISSOM map on waterproof paper. As you would expect, there are a number of special measures need for the event. The event is pre-entry only and it will be a mass start 45 minute score, with five “waves” starting between 9am and 10am – the early finish is needed to ensure that orienteers will have the space to run in, before the crowds arrive for the midday opening of the larger stores. Stratford City gets amazingly busy inside on a Sunday afternoon!

This will be the closest you will be able to get to the Olympic Park on an orienteering race for a few years to come – the park surrounds the triangular site on two sides, with the Athletes Villages to the north and the Olympic Stadium and the Aquatic Centre to the west. It’s the first orienteering race to take place here (the development has only been open for a few months) but it may well also be the last ever race here – with Sunday trading laws due to be relaxed for the Olympics and possibly becoming permanent after them, there may never be another opportunity to run around Westfield Stratford City free of crowds!

Yay! I finally heard today that I have been accepted as a volunteer for the Olympic Games in London this summer. It won’t be a particularly glamorous role – I’m not going to be the guy that hands Usain Bolt his towel on the finish line – but I should be within the Olympic Park at least some of the time during my 10 days of volunteering.

Following my interview I had heard nothing, while various other members of SLOW (my orienteering club) had been accepted into various roles and had subsequently gone through the induction training programme, so I assumed the worst. Nice that it came through in the end.

I’ve managed to spend a little bit of time in the Olympic Park already – attending test events at the Copper Box (formerly the Handball Arena) and at the Velodrome. Plus I am also working on a very interesting project in and around the Stratford City retail complex that is surrounded on two sides by the Olympic Park – more on that soon.

Part Two in an extremely rare series of ornate metal maps on features, is this map, which is on the gate to a student block in Tottenham Hale. The map is only in the correct orientation (i.e. eastwards to the right) when viewed from inside, so I’ve flipped the photo around so that it makes sense.

The gate/map shows the Walthamstow Reservoirs, as well as the surprisingly large amount of green space surrounding the area (which is part of the Lea Valley). The block itself is coloured in black. The dotted pattern appears to have no significance other than to add structure to the built-up areas where the road network doesn’t help.

I’m hoping to do some significant work on OpenOrienteeringMap (more information) in the near future.

Below is a summary of the major features that I am hoping to include, and you are invited to leave your feature requests as comments here too. (I may eventually get around to formalising this in a code repository.)

High Priority

• Editing of control locations, numbers and number positions for existing maps, via the web interface.
• Saving of existing maps, via a short URL.
• Applying out of bounds points (e.g. gates), lines (e.g. major roads) and areas (e.g. closed parks) to the maps.
• Addition of a new style – Street-O Enhanced, which builds on the Street-O style but adds parks, open areas and other useful features.
• Addition of a new style – Urban Adventure, which includes street names for the larger roads.
• Automatic creation of the clue-sheet.
• Assignment of points values to the controls. This will help with the clue-sheet creation and potential future route-analysis applications.
• Optional colouring of control circles based on points values.
• Better match of the look of the web preview and the final PDF.
• A basic how-to guide.
• Inclusion of a OpenStreetMap editing 101 guide.
• Output of a high-resolution raster (e.g. JPG) of completed maps and “blank” maps, for embellishment in Purple Pen etc.

Medium Priority

• Increase contour widths and/or darken colours.
• More configuration options, e.g. railways on/off, contours on/off.
• Import/export of courses, probably via text config file.
• Allow separate start and end points.
• Creation and setup of an alternative tile rendering source.
• Use source code management for the website and the stylesheets.
• Better usage tracking and statistics.

Low Priority

• Use OS Open Data Vector Map District as alternative data source – misses out paths/parks, but complete coverage for roads.
• Apply OpenOrienteeringMap logo and branding.
• Create point-to-point courses, with straight lines between each line.
• Use SVGs rather than raster graphics for points and complex lines.

Yes, the fifth running of the City of London Race, the world’s second biggest standalone urban orienteering race, will be happening, & as for previous years, I will be occasionally be blogging about it, as the mapping progresses.

Here’s the new bit I am planning on mapping this year (in red), along with what is already mapped (in green). The mapped area now far exceeds what will fit on the A3+ paper, so the red section actually represents around a third of the what will appear on the 2012 map. Another important caveat is that access agreements are still being negotiated, so it is not a 100% certainty that this is what this year’s map will look like.

The areas:

1. Hatton Garden. London’s jewellery and diamond quarter, with an interesting set of side-alleys.
2. Gray’s Inn and surrounding area – the former subject to access.
3. Great Ormond Street – the area around the famous children’s hospital.
4. Mount Pleasant – the area around the huge Royal Mail facility.
5. Lincoln’s Inn – subject to access.
6. Corram’s Fields. A backup area, in case we have to move our race HQ to around here – this is not our Plan A though, and we are keeping our preferred race HQ venue under wraps for now – it is cool though! Junior courses would then be in this park, which is particularly apt as adults are only allowed into the park when accompanied by a child!

Map from Cloudmade, contains OpenStreetMap data.

I was at the Velodrome in the Olympic Park yesterday, for the opening evening of the UCI Track World Cup London stage, which was also a London Prepares test event for the forthcoming Olympics. As such, it was the first opportunity to get into the Velodrome to watch an competitive event. The only races taking part were the Team Pursuit qualifications, but it was still exciting to see 33 teams go around the track (one at a time) at impressive speeds.

Tickets were not easy to get – I got through as a local resident, and even then had to apply on the dot as registrations opened, and the ticket site slowed down. So it was a little galling to see some seats (5-10%) remain empty all evening. As many of these were “prime” seats adjacent to the finish, I wonder if these were free seats give to sponsors, who then decided that the preliminary arounds weren’t that exciting to watch.

The logistics were also a little awkward – requiring a longish bus ride from right the other end of the park. With nearly 6,000 spectators to bus, there were inevitably long queues both to get to the velodrome, and (longer) coming back. Obviously for the Olympics itself, people will be walking around the park, rather than being bussed around it.

There were some technical issues on the night – the start gate failed to release one of the riders, at one point, and the overall time system got confused for a couple of teams and arbitrarily added over a minute to the affected team’s time, as they crossed the finish line. This was particularly odd as the erroneous time had not yet elapsed, so where this extra time came from I do not know. Of course, the whole point of test events like this is to test the equipment, in a competition environment, so that come August, the bugs will have been ironed out. One non-technical “incident” was that the Spanish men – who incidentally had the most striking tops of the night – managed to get themselves disqualified, for altering a bike into an illegal configuration after it had been measured. Oops!

But enough of the negatives, it is a super venue. We entered through the door where the roof shrinks right down so it is barely 10 foot above you – and then suddenly you are in a huge, brightly lit arena, with terraces of seats disappearing into the “Pringle” shape and masses of cyclists and bikes in the race team area within the track. Certainly the entrance had more of an impact than the previous test event I went to at the Copper Box (aka the Handball Arena). The seats are more comfortable too.

The best aspect of the night though was the two times that Team GB took to the track (the Women, and later the Men). Deafening clapping and cheering from start to finish of their cycle. If they can sort the other problems, the Olympic experience here is going to be amazing.

I went for a cycle around the perimeter of the Olympic Park on Saturday. The route is around 11km, and although it’s outside the park itself, there’s still plenty to see – particularly as the Greenway (also to be known soon as Victoria Walk) crosses through the site, and the Stratford City retail complex protrudes someway into it. I’ve already done the circuit twice in 2011 and also been on two bus tours inside the park, in 2010 and 2011. You can see my complete collection of Olympic Park photos on Flickr.

My route was along the Greenway, then along Stratford High Street, around Stratford City, then through Leyton and along Ruckholt Road to Hackney Marshes, finishing by returning down the canal to Hackney Wick, Fish Island and Old Ford. The last first and last sections are the most scenic – mainly because they don’t involve cycling along roads, so the natural state of the park and surrounding area is more evident.

The main changes were the appearance of a tunnel across the Greenway, linking the warm-up tracks to the stadium, lighting towers on the former, and much wider Greenway (with the security fencing moved back) and the complete, and surprisingly ugly, Olympic Village – maybe I just got it in a bad light. Crossrail also makes an appearance – the Pudding Mill Lane tunnel portal work has started. The blue Olympic hoarding in the area has been replaced by a slightly darker blue, with the Crossrail logo on it. With ongoing Olympic works on the other side, the narrow passageway looks like it will be there for a while yet.

There was also a lot more security fencing than I remember before in the north and east of the zone, with 16-foot high fencing, topped with a 4-foot electric fence, CCTV cameras and microwave detectors, protecting empty coach parks and concrete podiums away from the main park. I can understand it for the central area but it seemed a bit over the top for these areas which are generally unconnected to the main park.

Most excitingly was the appearance of two new slender footbridges, both of identical design, spanning the canal. These will “open up” the park in legacy mode (i.e. from late 2013 onwards) to the residents of Hackney Wick. One links to the Copper Box (formerly known as the Handball Arena) and the other is beside the Omega Works housing development and links to the area north of the main stadium. I’ve added both bridges on to OpenStreetMap, where they are currently showing as dotted pink blobs, i.e. under construction.

My favourite find was this furry graffiti monster, below, on a warehouse in Hackney Wick, overlooking the canal and sticking its tongue out at the Olympic Park. I think it’s been there for a while (and has been since “adorned” with other graffiti) but I hadn’t spotted it before now.

You can see all the photos in my Flickr album.

Thomas Schöps is developing a suite of open-source tools, Open Orienteering, including an application for creating orienteering maps called Open Orienteering Mapper (not to be confused with my own OpenOrienteeringMap. He is updating his blog regularly with development process, and today announced an alpha release of Mapper. The application runs on both Windows and Linux and shortly, following an imminent patch, Macs. The impact of a completely free, cross-platform application for creating “proper” orienteering maps, should not be underestimated. Having used both OCAD (PC only, expensive) and Illustrator/MapStudio (expensive) to create/edit maps in the past, and having failed to get Inkscape/MapStudio to work, I am quite excited about this. At the moment, ISOM maps can be created, but there are plans to include ISSOM (sprint standard) symbols sets soon. I am looking forward to creating my first OO Mapper map!

A not of caution – if you want try the software, be aware that is in an early (alpha) state and that you will need to have development tools installed in order to retrieve it (through git) and build and run it – the application is not ready yet for non-developers!

Mapper, along with the other applications in the Open Orienteering toolset, is being managed through Sourceforge and there is a bug tracker which already contains lots of ideas for further expanding the application.

I’ve been mining the British Orienteering event results pages and have produced a websites presenting the results in a more effective way – i.e. athlete focused rather than event focused. I’m also having a go at recalculating the ranking score based on this data.

Unfortunately there are a couple of flaws:

• The BOF ID is not available on the source website, so I have had to construct a key based on name (which can be misspelled on results uploads from time-to-time) and club (ditto). This mainly works, except where people change club, in which case their results, run under other clubs, that contribute to their ranking score, won’t be included.
• It turns out that, with each new result upload, all the ranking points for all events going back the whole of the last year – possibly more – are recalculated. This has the effect of old scores drifting slightly – I wasn’t expecting the points to fluctuate in such a way. The effect is mainly small – so far one of my scores has drifted by 1 point – but another person’s score has drifted by 7 points. I could mitigate this by scraping all results over the last year every night, but this would put strain on BOF’s servers and they would probably not appreciate it – it would be over 5000 page requests over the course of several hours. So, instead, I’m updating the most recent 25 events nightly and may manually resync the whole year on an ad-hoc basis. The result is that, after a while, the scores don’t match precisely with those on the source website.

The toughness scores for each event are just a bit of fun and based on the details of the course, not how well people did on it. The urban shading is also just based on the name of the event, rather than any specific metadata on the event that I am accessing. Such metadata may be available in the event details section of the source website but I am just using the results information here.

The collation of a large number of results has highlighted various data problems, such as results appearing as HH:MM rather than MM:SS, or x,xxx km instead of x.xxx km. Unfortunately one of my own (few) event result uploads suffered the first problem. This doesn’t affect the points at all, because the times within each course are only used on a relative, not absolute, basis, but it does preclude me, for example, totalling the “yearly run hours” for each athlete, without cleaning up the data on my side.

You can see the stats here – type in your name and club to see your stats. See the notes on the search page, e.g. most Level D events not included. You can also compare two people, looking at where they ran the same courses at the same event.

I’ve had an idea for a new type of orienteering club for London. One with a slightly different focus to the current ones. My inspiration is City Runners and Centrum OK, and to a lesser extent Stragglers RC and Fetch Everyone.

• Its aim would be member training, socialising and attending external events in a coordinated way, rather than putting on events.*
• Its initial life would be as an community orienteering group (it is unclear whether such entities can be affiliated to the national federation) moving to full club status when membership numbers – and so finances – allowed, and certainly before it put on public events. Alternatively, and probably more likely, it could exist as a satellite of another club, such as MADO, which is/was a satellite of HOC.*
• Membership would be very cheap – say £4 (+national/regional membership) or even free – it would be the cheapest way to be a member of an orienteering club and a national federation – especially as local-level national/regional membership is also free for the first year, making membership completely free for new people.**
• It would potentially affiliate also to England Athletics – although as community running group rather than as a full running club.*
• It would be an open, geographical club with core membership intended to be in, but not limited to, London Zones 1-4, or people who are otherwise very well connected to the centre of London.*
• It would be called something like Central London or Cross River, to reflect its central London focus. Acronyms for the club name would be avoided as far as possible.*
• It would have little kit of its own. It would probably have a small set of training flags, possibly acquired through the “Year in a Box”, bought from the national federation.
• It would have a significant sponsor.

PROMOTION
• Promotion would be entirely online. It would have a small, low-key website, an announcement email list, a Facebook group and probably a Twitter account.*
• Its primary form of promotion, announcements etc would be through the Facebook group.*
• If funds allowed, a limited amount of advertising would be placed through Facebook and Google Adwords.
• It would not have a paper newsletter, print flyers or indeed have any paper presence.*

EVENTS AND TRAINING
• It would in fact run some events, membership willing, but these would mainly be in the Street-O format (both score and point-to-point). Eventually it would put on a couple of Park Race style events in the summer time, once a small number of parks had been mapped by members of the club and members had gained the necessary qualifications.***
• Professional mappers would not be employed. If possible, the club’s maps would be produced using FOSS.
• As soon as its finances allowed, first-claim members would be able to attend all events put on by the club for free.
• Its members would be actively encouraged to regularly take part in local events put on by the other London clubs and, if available, join such clubs as second-claim members.
• It would eventually have a club kit but this would be in the form of runners’ technical tops rather than orienteering kit or runners’ race kit.*
• It would have a club night run from a regular and central London location, probably a friendly pub. This would often take the form of a run rather than technical training.*

Inspired by:
* City Runners
** Stragglers
*** Centrum OK

Photo by timbobee.

1. Courses put on by clubs:

vs Actual runs done, by course:

…which shows that we put on a lot of Orange and Yellow courses, but really everyone wants to run Green or Blue.

2. Actual runs done, by club of the runner:

vs Actual runs done, by organising club:

…which shows that some clubs are mainly about organising events (e.g. HOC), some are mainly about running in events (e.g. BOK), but most are about both.

3. Finally – which regions see the most number of runs?

S(OA) = Scotland, W = Wales. The rest are English regions: NE/NW/SE/SW, EA (East Anglia), SC = (South Central), YH (Yorkshire/Humberside), EM/WM (E/W Midlands). While large events that rotate around the regions on a multi-year timetable will distort this, some very large events (e.g. the Scottish 6 Days) don’t appear on British Orienteering’s system as having a region associated with them, so will not appear in the above Wordle.

My 50 new MOO Facebook cards arrived today – I ordered them on Thursday last week, taking advantage of the first 200,000 sets ordered being free. The cards are auto-created from my Facebook profile, the builder then allows you to further customise them. Note you need to have a new-style Timeline profile on Facebook to work – not everyone has been offered the option to upgrade to this yet.

I’m particularly impressed with the quality of the paper the cards are printed on – a nice, smooth feel – and the neat Facebook-branded presentation holder they come in. The photos look surprisingly low-res and rather blurry, particularly the small profile photo. It doesn’t bug me too much though – they are nicer than my official business cards, and were completely free!

I think I’m almost back to being able to run now, although I have dropped in fitness slightly. Here’s my race plan for Spring 2012:

• Tue 10 Jan – SLOW Marylebone Street-O
• Sun 15 Jan – MVOC Holmbush
• Sat 21 Jan – EUOC Edinburgh City Race
• Sun 22 Jan – EUOC Holyrood Park
• Thu 26 Jan – CHIG Victoria Park Street-O
• Sun 29 Jan – BKO Concorde Chase?
• Thu 2 Feb – SAX Sevenoaks Street-O
• Sun 5 Feb – DFOK Chelwood
• Tue 7 Feb – SLOW Brockley Street-O
• Sun 12 Feb – CHIG Claybury
• Sun 19 Feb – CompassSport Cup Qualifier
• Sun 26 Feb – SLOW Wimbledon
• Sat 3 Mar – St Andrews Scottish Sprint Champs
• Sun 4 Mar – St Andrews City Race
• Sat 10 Mar – Varsity Match at Burnham Beeches
• Sun 11 Mar – Varsity Match Relays
• Tue 13 Mar – SLOW Street-O
• Sun 18 Mar – DFOK Mereworth?
• Wed 21 Mar – Possible Munro trip
• Sat 24 Mar – British Sprint Championships, York
• Sun 25 Mar – British Middle Championships, near York
• Sun 1 Apr – Waltham Half Marathon
• W/e 6-9 Apr – JK, Scotland
• Tue 10 Apr – SLOW Street-O
• Sun 15 Apr –
• Sat 21 Apr – JOK Chasing Sprint
• Sun 22 Apr – Back to London to help at the London Marathon?
• Sun 29 Apr –
• Sat 5 May – British Championships, Lake District
• Sun 6 May – British Relays, Lake District

I was along on Saturday, along with James, Dan and Isla, for the semi-finals of the London Handball Cup. Handball is a sport I had never seen or even thought about before (along with the majority of the UK, I expect) but it’s an Olympic sport, and this event was a test event (part of the London Prepares series) for next year’s Games. Particularly exciting for me was that the event was taking place in the Handball Arena, a new permanent venue that is in the Olympic Park itself – so this was an excellent early chance to walk through and experience this huge newly transformed area of London, ahead of next year’s Games and the presumed general opening of the park to the non-ticketed public sometime in late 2013 or early 2014.

The tournament was over four days (Thursday to Sunday) with six women’s teams, and on Saturday the semi-finals and the 5th/6th place playoff was taking place. Unfortunately, the new Great Britain team was in the latter playoff – and lost to Slovakia 17-22. The other game we saw was the Angola vs Poland semi-finals, which was tied at 22-22 after normal time, resulting in 10 minutes of extra time being needed. Being such a close score, things got pretty exciting at the end.

Handball was a pretty easy game to pick up for spectating (the event guide helped) and the new arena is great. The seating is multicoloured, to provide the illusion of the arena always being full of spectators even if it is half empty. Everything’s brand new and – although the seating is rather uncomfortable, it was OK for the two matches (an hour each) that we stayed for. This being a test event, there were a few hitches – one notable one being the scoreboard, which displays an impressive number of stats, freezing up. The wrong team also got a point scored after a penalty, although this was presumably human error.

It was a bleak, windswept and chilly 1km walk from Westfield Stratford – the entry point – to the arena itself, but it did mean a walk right through the park (between temporary security fences) crossing numerous wide bridges and passing the Water Polo arena (temporary) and almost underneath the front of the Aquatic Centre. There is quite a lot of landscaping going on, and the odd tree here and there, but also large areas of hard paving, unfortunately reminiscent of the area around the O2 or Surrey Quays but I am sure necessary to cope with the huge volumes of people next summer. Hopefully the post-games conversion work will do a lot to break up the windswept plazas and soften the park area.

One particularly odd bridge had soft paving made up of multicoloured circles, rather lurid and jarring, and presumably soon to fade to murky brown with the weather over the winter. Surely some nice Portland granite would be better, or red brick – presumably much more expensive though. If the Barbican Estate can get large expanses of paving right, then why not the Olympic Park?

Still, it’s going to be a fascinating new part of London to explore – eventually.

Just a quick post for people who use Attackpoint – >a OpenOrienteeringMap (OOM) is on it! More specifically, you can view GPS routes that people have uploaded, using OpenOrienteeringMap as a background.

To do this:
1. Click on the little “globe” icon beside an entry that has a GPS log. Here’s an example from my Venice Street Race run on Sunday.
2. On the map that loads, click on the “OSM” button on the top right.
3. Click on one of the OOM items on the menu that appears just below the OSM button.

(Note, the global version of OOM is used – this one does not update as the OpenStreetMap database updates, but instead on a more occasional schedule.)

The basemap is based on OpenStreetMap data.